In the Garden of Sin (14 page)

Elic spread his legs to make room for Inigo behind Lucy.
Crouching on his haunches, Inigo whipped off his shirt and popped open the buttons of his breeches. He retrieved the little white bottle from his pocket and dripped oil down the length of his cock, using his fist to coat it in three swift strokes.

Slowly he withdrew the lacquered dildo, which, despite its size, didn’t approach the length and girth of the phallus rising between Inigo’s legs. He parted her buttocks and touched the broad head of his cock to the tiny opening.

“Do you want it fast or slow?” he asked her.

“Fast.”

Planting one foot on the bed to brace himself, he got a good grip on her and rammed himself in.

From her seemingly tortured groan, I was worried for a moment that he’d hurt her, but it was a groan of ecstasy, as I soon realized. Elic stroked her between her legs as she writhed like a wild thing, rasping “Deeper, both of you. Oh, God, deeper. Fuck me! Fuck me harder. Oh…oh…”

She came with an explosive scream, but she didn’t even slow down, just kept thrashing and thrusting and moaning and begging them to fuck her harder, deeper.

Elic arched his hips and shuddered, his face darkening, a vein rising on his forehead. Inigo paused for a moment, stilling Lucy with one hand banded around her waist and the other gripping a breast. When Elic’s climax ended and he started thrusting again, so did Inigo and Lucy. Elic came again, not long afterward; this time, I saw thick white fluid oozing out from where he was joined to Lucy.

Inigo’s thrusts grew more frenzied. He shifted his position, lowering the bent leg. As he did so, his unbuttoned breeches slipped down. He yanked them up, but in the split second before he did, I saw something that made my jaw drop.

I can still see it, when I close my eyes and revisit that afternoon in my mind. The breeches fall, revealing something that
doesn’t belong there, a fleshy, whiplike something growing out of the base of his spine.
A tail
, I think as I sit on the floor in that dark, carpeted passage, staring. He’s already covered himself back up again, but I know what I saw.

I think.

“What’s wrong?” Elic asked, wondering why Inigo had gone still. Lucy, oblivious, was still thrusting away.

“You don’t suppose someone’s watching right now, do you?” Inigo looked around fretfully, pushing a hand through his wild mop of hair, in which I saw, or imagined, a pair of small, bony stumps. The tips of his ears, which I hadn’t seen before, were ever so slightly pointed.

I stood up, staring and shaking my head.
Nay. I’m imagining things
. If so, however, it would be the first time in my life that my mind had ever conjured up something that wasn’t there.

“Is anyone there?” Inigo asked loudly, glancing one by one at the veiled gaps between the mirrored panels.

I bit my lip, weighing the pros and cons of responding.

“What says that bloodhound’s nose of yours, brother?” Inigo inquired.

Elic drew in a breath slowly. “There might be a female. I smell orange flowers, lavender, frankincense…”

“That’s just Lucy.”

Elic scowled in concentration. “Possibly, but—”

“É!”
Inigo happened to be looking in my direction when he yelled this.

I lifted my skirts and ran.

“Qui va là,”
he called out, but I was already sprinting down the stairs.

OUR DAYS LATER, while Elle and I were strolling arm in arm across the west lawn toward the castle for dinner, I stopped walking, forcing her to stop, as well.

She looked at me expectantly, her face shadowed from the noon sun by the broad brim of her straw hat.

“I didn’t come here to learn to be a courtesan,” I said.

After a moment, she pointed to a swing bench beneath a vine-covered arbor in the rose garden adjacent to the castle’s west wall. “Let us go sit in the shade, shall we?”

We sat on the swing, our skirts mounding into a crackling, colorful heap. My black mourning attire had been supplanted by the luxurious new wardrobe Signora Tozzi and her staff were busily sewing day and night. Two days ago, we novices were told that every morning we would be given a newly finished dress to wear that day, so that Signor Vitturi could pass
judgment upon it, while the dress from the day before would be taken away for alterations.

That day’s gown, which I found both exquisite and scandalous, had been designed to make the most of my slender frame and dainty breasts. It was fashioned of deep blue satin embroidered in gold, its heavily boned bodice featuring a wide gap in front that was laced together with gold cords. As it was intended to be worn with neither shift nor stomacher, the open bodice bared a wide expanse of my chest and stomach; any wider, and it would have exposed my nipples. The voluminous leg-o’-mutton sleeves, which were trussed to the bodice with ribbon rosettes, had been generously slashed, with undersleeves of fine white sarcenet puffing through the slits. The skirt was undivided, in the Venetian style, its deep hem lightly tacked so that it could be rehemmed longer and worn with chopines.

Signora Tozzi, who declared it to be the most beautiful and seductive dress she had ever created, called it
“il vestito dallo zaffiro”
—the sapphire gown. So enamored of it had Elle been when she saw it that morning that she’d asked the gifted dressmaker to create an exact replica for herself. Signora Tozzi had objected that Elle was too generously endowed on top for a bodice with such a wide opening, whereupon Elle had offered a thousand ducats for the gown, silencing Madame’s objections.

Elle untied her bonnet and tossed it onto a nearby bench. “What you tell me will never pass my lips, Hannah. Not once in my life have I revealed a secret that I’ve been asked to keep. And I assure you,” she added with an enigmatic little smile, “I am far older than I look.”

Elle was my only confidante at Grotte Cachée, and a woman of singular insight. If there was anyone who might have some notion as to how to run the elusive Duke of
Buckingham to ground, it would be she. Not to mention that she was the only person there whom I could truly trust.

And not to mention that I was, at that point, pathetically desperate. My uncle’s fate was in my hands, and I was failing him utterly.

I told her everything. Toward the conclusion of my account, I began weeping in frustration at Buckingham’s continued inaccessibility, for so obsessed was he with his hunting that I’d scarcely laid eyes on him since we’d been there. I’d seen plenty of dead boars being lugged across the courtyard, and I’d eaten so much pork that I’d grown quite sick of it, but the duke had continued to keep himself well isolated from most of his fellow visitors to Grotte Cachée.

Elle dried my tears with a scented handkerchief and took me in her arms, murmuring pacifying things until my composure returned.

I told her I felt awful for having kept such a secret from her these past weeks, given what close friends we’d become.

She said, “We all have our secrets, Hannah. I’ve kept things from you, too, secrets about this place and those of us who live here.”

As she said that, I was reminded of the many little enigmas I had encountered at Grotte Cachée—the bird named Darius who “didn’t care to be thought of as a pet,” the hallucinatory magnetism in the cave and bathhouse, Elic’s unnatural sexual stamina, the erudite Elle’s willingness to believe that a Venetian courtesan named Galiana Solsa was a bloodsucking demon…

Humans like to think they know all there is to know about the world and the beings who populate it
, Elle had told me,
but they don’t, nor do they really want to, most of them
.

Humans
, she’d said, not
we humans. They
and
them
, not
we
and
us
.

And then, of course, there was what I’d seen in
la Chambre des Voiles et des Miroirs
when Inigo’s breeches had slipped down. Since then, it had dawned on me how much he resembled the lusty satyr in the bathhouse statues, even as regarded his build, his facial features, and those tight corkscrew curls— although Inigo’s hair was much longer than that on the statue, effectively hiding the horns and ears.

“Is Inigo a…” I felt foolish saying it, but I plowed ahead. “… a satyr?”

I’d asked it in order to gauge Elle’s reaction. She should have burst out laughing. Instead, she stared at me for a second too long before looking off across the lawn with an uncharacteristically tight little smile. Pushing the swing back and forth with her foot, she said, “What an extraordinary question.”

“I saw his tail with my own eyes,” I said, with as much certitude as I could muster. “And I think I saw something that might have been horns, and pointed ears.”

“Whom have you told of this?” Elle asked. Not
You can’t be serious
, but
Whom have you told?

“I asked the other novices if they’d noticed any unusual body parts on Inigo. Of course, they all laughed and pointed out the obvious. I told them what I’d seen, or… thought I’d seen. I asked if he’d ever removed his breeches in their presence. He hadn’t. I asked if they’d ever felt anything unusual on his head. They all said he hated to be touched there, or even to have his hair stroked.”

“Did they believe you about the tail and so forth?” Elle asked.

“Sibylla and Lucy thought I was imagining things. Bianca wasn’t so sure. She truly believes in… what she calls
Folletti
— incubi and the like. She was talking in the carriage on the way here about the strange phenomena at Grotte Cachée that her sister told her about—and the strange beings. She said something
about Elic and Inigo not being ordinary men, and how there’s a hermit who lives in the cave and can take the shape of animals.”

“Did she.”

“What are you, Elle? Are you a dusii?” I asked, recalling her slip of the tongue in the library when she was talking about her need for carnal sustenance.
No one woman could ever satisfy me
.

“The singular is ‘dusios.’” She looked away again with that forced smile. “How on earth did we end up talking about this?”

With quiet gravity, I said, “I’ve never betrayed a confidence either, Elle, upon my faith—never.”

Taking my hand, she said, “I believe you, Hannah, but if I were what you suspect I am, can you not understand how dangerous it would be to confide in
any
human, even one in whom I have the utmost trust? There are still many places where Follets are being burned alive as witches, even those who’ve done no harm to anyone. Were such beings to find a safe haven, such as Grotte Cachée, they would be loath to jeopardize it by making their presence here known, would they not?”

I opened my mouth to pursue the subject, hesitating when I noticed her gaze shift to something over my right shoulder. Turning, I saw a figure in the distance walking with a slightly halting gait along the gravel drive leading from the gatehouse to the stable and carriage house tucked away in the woods. Domenico Vitturi was wearing his usual black doublet and breeches, and he had a book in his hand.

“Where does he go when he wanders off like that?” I asked, more to myself than to Elle.

Ever since the afternoon he’d summoned me to the Training Room, Vitturi had become virtually as reclusive as
the Duke of Buckingham. He rarely ate with the rest of us, and when he did, he was uncommunicative. According to the other novices, the last time he was intimate with one of them was in the bathhouse that first night, and Elle told me he hadn’t touched her since London. When in the castle, he often holed himself up in the library. Most of his time, however, was spent somewhere off in the woods with his books. He no longer observed our training sessions with
les professeurs de l’amour
—or rather, the other novices’ training sessions. Over the course of the past four days, I had learned to hunt with hawks, paint landscapes, discuss political matters intelligently, and a host of other things, but although my fellow novices continued to receive erotic instruction, not once had I been required to observe or participate in it.

Nor, of course, had I been required to “compensate” Signor Vitturi for his patronage in any way. I realized at that point that he could have obliged me to perform any number of acts that would have gratified him sexually without compromising my virginity, but he had not done so.